Around Town
Mrs. Aune Drops By the Library, Inspects the Ladder, Is Gently Sent Home
The children’s librarian made her first public appearance since coming home — ten minutes, one shelving correction, and a room full of children who finished their story without her only because she insisted.
MISQUAH — Ruth Aune came back to the library Friday. Not to work — the doctor’s orders on that point remain in force, and were enforced — but to look, which those who know her understood to be the more urgent errand. She arrived at 11 a.m., as story time was letting out, and stayed ten minutes by the clock and considerably longer by the feeling in the room.
The children got to her first. Story-time attendance being what it has been this summer, this took a while, and Mrs. Aune received the crowd the way she receives everything, which is one at a time. She asked several of them where they were on the ladder. She was told, in detail, at volume, occasionally with supporting documentation.
Then she inspected the ladder itself — the hand-drawn reading chart, forty-one climbers strong, its animal stickers now crowding the upper rungs — and pronounced it, per multiple witnesses, “very satisfactory.” She then walked directly to the picture-book shelves and corrected a single misfiled book: the same misfiling, Megan Tollefson confirmed, that Mrs. Aune had reported from home earlier this month, and that Megan now admits she left in place on purpose. “I wanted her to have something to find,” Megan said. “She’d have been disappointed if everything was right.”
Mrs. Aune declined to comment for this story beyond noting that the library “appears to have managed,” which Megan is having framed. She looked well — the town will want to know that, and it is true, and it is also all this newspaper will say on the subject, per its standing practice and her family’s wishes.
At ten past eleven, per the arrangement her family had made in advance, she was walked to the car. She left with a stack of her own casserole dishes, washed and returning home — the great porch migration of July now flowing in reverse — and with instructions to keep resting, which she accepted the way she accepts a late book: formally, without argument, and with a clear eye on the calendar.
No date has been set for her return to the desk, and none will be rushed. The ladder is full, the stickers are holding, and the corner is being kept. She has seen it herself now. The town suspects that was the medicine the doctor couldn’t order.